My dad puts about three or four exclamation points after everything he types in a text. He has also been known to take and send pointless (and unflattering) photos of my mum on the couch, with captions like ‘your mother is playing her iPad’ or ‘my bride in a chair’.

Mum, on the other hand, took about three years to be convinced that she wasn’t getting charged per character on her text messages (we used to get a reply of either ‘ok’ or ‘no’ to every text we sent her). Her new texting style is to write in short, factual sentences as though she is in the military. “Got new chickens. Good layers. Dad’s shoulder getting better. Cooking lasagne tonight. Luv u. Luv mum/Carmel.”

The ‘mum/Carmel’ thing baffles me. I know who is sending me the text … and I know my mother’s name. Still, she persists.

A common phenomenon

A brief and unofficial survey of my Facebook friends revealed I am not the only one whose parents have strange texting habits.

“My dad is king of the blunt reply,” wrote one friend. “I’ll be like, ‘Hey dad, you free tonight? I’m thinking beer and pizza awesomeness? Seven? Public? Are you totally in/extremely excited?’ and he’ll reply ‘yes’. My mum always writes ‘citag’ instead of bitch and always replies with emojis, but after like 45 minutes of searching for them. Sometimes she’ll even be like, ‘Is there a sex emoji?’ and I’m left wondering why the hell she needs one of those.”

“My mother has texted me twice in her/my life,” reveals Ella Walsh, Kidspot’s Managing Editor. “The second time was just this weekend. Despite being a pedantic sub-editor her whole life, she seems to have taken up stream-of-consciousness texting, including a charming lack of punctuation. Either that or she was drunk texting me!”

Jennifer, another Facebook friend, explained that her mother-in-law is also firmly in the cost-cutting camp when it comes to texting. “[She] still thinks texts are charged by the letter, so she makes up her own abbreviations – her messages are indecipherable! She also uses ‘cum’ in place of ‘come’, which makes me cringe.”

Trouble with technology

It’s no surprise that the older generation has a slightly harder time grasping the concept and style of communicating by text. After all, it is relatively new and technology gets harder to pick up the older you become.

“When Dad first texted he didn’t know where the space button was, so he used a full stop after every word. Just.like.this.” writes James, another Facebook friend.

Yet another user explained that it was not a lack of understanding of technology, but too much enthusiasm for it, that made her dad’s texts so hard to understand: “He will try and say everything in emoticons, and you’re left trying to decipher the combination of pictures he’s sent you.”

For as bad as our parents are at texting, we’re always there to make fun of them for it, which is why the internet is positively awash with examples people have shared. We’ve collected a few classics to share with you. We may as well laugh while we can – because sooner or later, our kids are going to come up with a new generation of technology that leaves us just as bumbling and confused as texting did for our parents.

For your enjoyment, these are just a few of the things that can happen when parents start to text: